About Brandon P. Otto

Brandon P. Otto is a member of the St. Louis Byzantine Catholic Mission in St. Louis, MO. He is currently pursuing a Master's Degree in Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, with particular interest in the Fathers and liturgies of the Eastern Churches.

In learning how to craft homilies, it is worth studying past master homilists; from these masters, we can learn masterful techniques. Reading those who wrote in one’s own native tongue is, of course, a necessary thing: Newman would probably … [Read more...]

Is not the neglect of this plain duty (I mean fasting, ranked by our Lord with almsgiving and prayer) one general occasion of deadness among Christians? Can anyone willingly neglect it and be guiltless?[1. John Wesley, The Journal of John … [Read more...]

In the past century or so, dialectic has become a tool for analyzing many areas of life and thought: we might consider the dialectic between “being-for-itself” (l’être-pour-soi), and “being-for-others” (l’être-pour-autrui) in the philosophy … [Read more...]

St. John Paul II famously proclaimed that “The Church must breathe with two lungs”—speaking of the Western Church and the Eastern Church. Such breathing is meant to permeate all of the Church’s life and not just, say, the lives of histori … [Read more...]

(This title is inspired by Edward Yarnold’s The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: Baptismal Homilies of the Fourth Century (Slough, Great Britain: St. Paul Publications, 1971), the title of which is based on the common language of “awe” use … [Read more...]